I could not have had a better companion to my insomnia than Rebecca Agiewich's Breakup Babe. Thanks to MizHidee for lending it.

It was not the cause of my sleeplessness (let's just say my low back is totally on my shit list), but it could well have been; the story is that of a tech-employed editor at "Empire Corp." in what just might be Redmond. She risks unemployment, ridicule, catharsis and discovery by blogging about her Ultimate Breakup and all subsequent dating hijinks. Fun stuff. Friendly stuff. And oh-so-familiar stuff.

(If it seems I'm typing slowly, you just try typing with an attention-whore, 18-pound ManCat on your lap.)

She cries a lot. She takes anti-depressants and dates "HBIBs", hot-but-inappropriate boys. All males are boys, in her blog jargon. She fantasizes about running off to an adventurous job, or that she will get the commitment-phobe to commit, or that she just might marry the Jewish doctor she's been programmed since birth to pursue.

I'm not done with the book, but nearly done. I won't give away anything about it. And I certainly won't expect you to check out her Breakup Babe blog, where it all started.

Thanks again, Miz H, for the read. (I owe you a good one in return. Cormack McCarthy's The Road, perhaps? It's way more of a downer than BB. But the use of the language will make you swoon. It's like Tom Robbins meets The Day After.)

Now that I've been up three times since 11pm last night, and seeing as it's after 5am, I'm going back up to the loft to see if I can get any kind of sleep in. I've done two hot baths, a hot pack on my low back, three aspirin (they usually work for me), a piece of buttered toast (to buffer the aspirin), Kytta Salbe (German anti-inflammatory cream, naturopathic/herbal), and Cryo-Freeze (American mentholated spray). Goodness sakes, I've even rolled around on the floor with the rolling pin under my back, to get a deep-pressure release for the spasm. Temporary, at best.

But before I sleep, I still have 20 pages of BB left. Adieu.

(PS/update: went back to bed at 5am, finished the book, slept like a baby until ten o'clock.)